I’ve found a handful of reasons, when developing new websites, to want to acquire existing websites or domains. I do not mean parked domains, I mean websites that are active, but not successful, and are in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). In this post I’m going to discuss why you should be researching domains and websites that show up in SERPs for your website’s targeted keywords.
Skip the Sandbox
Things are always changing in the Google algorithm, but it’s been known for some time that Google tends to limit the exposure of brand new websites. Unless you can burst onto the scene and get tons of links quickly, you won’t show up on the first page for the keywords you are targeting for quite a while. It used to be a rule of thumb that you wouldn’t see your website in the top 10-20 pages in Google for 6-12 months after its release. Google has become much more dynamic, but mostly with content on existing, well ranking, websites. But one thing you can bank on is if you purchase an existing domain that is 2+ years old you can skip any type of sandboxing of your website in the SERPs. So sometimes acquiring an existing domain is better than coming up with a brand new domain name. Do some searches for websites that rank decently for your keywords. Getting your website in the top 5 pages right out of the gate is a great start. You will hopefully be building backlinks after the release so your site should move up in the SERPs. Any website that has the keywords in the domain will be easier to optimize for search engines, but this doesn’t mean it will be the most marketable domain available. Most of the big internet websites don’t include their purpose, or keywords, in their domain.
Jump SERPs
Let’s say you start a new website about Poker. Let’s say that the #5 website in Google when you search for “poker” is something like “pokerpoker123.com”. Your website has a more marketable name like “Donkfest.com” (a humorous poker term). If you can negotiate a purchase of “pokerpoker123.com” you can set up a 301 (moved permanently) redirect to “Donkfest.com” and once Google picks up on this, suddenly “Donkfest.com” replaces “pokerpoker123.com” in the SERPs. Now you’ve jumped from nowhere in Google to the #5 spot. Most of your keyword competitors will ignore this failing website and you can just snatch it up and jump right into the competition.
Gain Backlinks
The main reason that SERP Jumping works is that when you 301 the domain to your website you suddenly acquire all of its backlinks. So if that website had 500 backlinks and you had 20, now you have 520 backlinks. This obviously creates an increase in your Google PR. This will also help you with Bing/Yahoo and other search engines. But aside from the SERP jump you will now start getting referral traffic from these websites that linked to the other website. You could see a significant amount of traffic from visitors trying to visit this older website via links.
Kill the Failing Competition
Sometimes you’ll have a competitor that has been around so long, and has so many backlinks, that they stick at the #1 spot in Google for your keyword despite getting half the traffic you do. Their site is not as successful as yours, they aren’t updating it, but they maintain that #1 spot with no effort. You might convince yourself that since you can see more activity on your website than on theirs that #2 in Google is just as good as #1. The concern here is, what happens if someone with some drive and vision decides to purchase that #1 website and totally revamp it? Now you have a driven competitor who already has the upper hand with the #1 spot in the SERPs. This could cost you thousands in advertising if you suddenly feel that you have to convince searchers that your site is actually better/bigger/more important than that #1 site that used to be so lackluster. Don’t risk this happening. If you can acquire that #1 site for the cost of a few months of revenue, you can save yourself tons in advertising expenses should someone decide to buy the site and revamp it (or 301 redirect it to their existing website). So, with purchasing that #1 site you can SERP Jump and remove a potential thorn in your side at the same time.
Make a Deal
If you get an individual to agree to sell their domain to you your going to want to have them sign a contract that includes a few specifics before you even consider how to physically pay for and transfer the domain.
- Make sure that the seller agrees to sell you any related domains, not just the domain that you discovered. I once purchased a domain only to discover later that the seller had other domains that had been linked to the same website. Once the 301 was set up to my new website, instead of SERP Jumping, the sellers other domain just replaced the original one in the SERPs. I’m still not 100% sure how this happened, but it’s my fault for not making sure that a) he didn’t have other related domains and b) that he agreed to take down the website content that had ranked well for the keywords.
- Require the seller to agree to not make any WHOIS changes prior to the sale. This can delay the transfer as some registrars lock domains for 30 days after a WHOIS change.
- Ask the seller to not make any website changes from the time of the sale to the time of the transfer. You don’t want them to adversely affect the website’s ranking right before you buy it.
- Use Google Webmaster Tools to tell Google about the website move.
- Don’t think that you have to fork over tens of thousands for a domain. I’ve been able to acquire domains for only $2,000-$3,000 that had much more value to me than that, as expected.
- Make sure to have the seller sign a contract that holds him to these promises.
Complete the Purchase
Your best option for safely acquiring the domain is Escrow.com. Escrow.com allows a buyer and seller to make the transaction online without any chance of one party being cheated. The purchaser will pay Escrow the money for the domain, an amount that was agreed upon by both registered Escrow.com users. Escrow.com will then instruct the seller to transfer the domain to the buyer. Escrow allows the buyer to register their WHOIS information and only releases the funds to the seller once the domain’s WHOIS information has changed to the buyer’s information. This way everyone is safe and the sale and transfer goes without a hitch.
Setup a Redirect
Once you acquire the domain you’ll want to 301 redirect the main domain to your new site. Research any page on the old site that might be in line with current pages on your site and 301 those pages directly to the pages on your site that relate. Be sure that you have a custom 404 page set up so that users get your website navigation if they visit a page that does not exist. You don’t want them to get a web server 404 page with no navigation.
What is it?
In short, jQuery is a JavaScript library that makes it easier to do some of the things you do in JS every time you create a new website. If you adopt jQuery for even one website you will end up adopting it for every website after that. JQuery changes the way you select and modify HTML elements in JavaScript.
I’ve never been big on JavaScript libraries, since I feel that I can just about write anything in JS that I need. Although I will Google for code from time to time, I’ve just never found much of a need for a JS library. I will admit that I’ve used Yahoo’s drag’n'drop controls on LeagueAce.com, though. I had heard of jQuery, or at least seen mentions of it in forum posts, but never tried to discover what it was. Then one day, when I had absolutely nothing to do, I Googled “jQuery”. Now, jQuery’s website isn’t the best place to figure out what it does, IMO. I had to read a few blog posts and then read through the jQuery documentation before it made any sense. I think that jQuery could do a much better job of explaining what it is to newbies on their website.
JQuery Example Usage
The most common use of jQuery is to easily select and modify HTML objects in JavaScript. Please note that the following code examples are not tested, are from my memory, and might need slight changes to actually work. Where we normally code “document.getElementById(element).className = class” we can now code “$(element).addClass(class)“. Where we normally have to write a loop in order to get the value of a selected dropdown item with standard JS, in jQuery we can instead code “var test = $(element).val()“. JQuery simplifies the process of selecting the correct HTML element, changing its properties, getting it’s value, etc. JQuery allows you to select elements in different ways, which is one of the coolest features. You can select an element via it’s HTML ID ($(“#id”)), via the tag type ($(“:input text”)), via CSS class ($(“.class”)), etc. JQuery can also select elements based on parent-child relationships. So you could select every text input element inside of a DIV with the ID of “divTest” ($(“:input text”, “$divTest”)), for example. As mentioned in the dropdown menu example jQuery has foreach ability for looping through elements that are selected. JQuery allows you to string together methods so you could make multiple changes to one object by simply adding “.method1(value1).method2(value2)” to the end of your command.
Summary
JQuery has some other features, like transition effects, that are “nice” but far from the reason why I started using it on all my new websites. The simplicity of how you can select HTML elements makes you wish that JavaScript had been written like this from the beginning.
There are many different revenue models for making money through owning a website. The most popular models are a) providing a free website and monetizing the website by running ads, b) running a pay website (subscription/pay accounts) with out ads, and c) running a mostly free website with some pay options, or pay accounts with additional features. This last option is known as the “freemium” revenue model. Many of the websites that I have created use this model. Instead of discussing different ways to implement a freemium website, which can be found elsewhere, this blog post will discuss the elements of a web-based service that make it a prime candidate for the freemium revenue model.
New Type of Product
When a company creates a brand new type of product, or market, freemium can be the best way to get the product off the ground. Being able to entice users to use the product for free can jump start a new concept into being a huge hit. If you are creating a product that is hard to explain to users who have never used it before, freemium is a good revenue model to consider. Twitter.com is a good example of a product that would be a great freemium product. Although Twitter has not released upgrade accounts, for higher volume users or for advanced users, the Twitter concept was new when it was introduced and they allow users to use the service for free in order to get it off the ground. Although Twitter has focused on alternative advertising methods for its initial revenue attempts, at some point upgraded accounts are bound to come into play as a revenue stream. Dropbox.com, an online storage service, is hard for the average PC users to conceive. They have used freemium as a way to get users, mostly from current user referrals, to try their service. So when you tell your mom and dad that Dropbox is an option for backing up all those new digital camera pictures, they can try it out without having to understand the concept first. Once they have decided that they do indeed need a cloud storage service, they can upgrade their account and start backing up all of their files.
Commitment Products
Some products take a longer than average amount of time to sufficiently experience their features. If your users need to interact with your website over a period of days or weeks just to discover whether the product is worth using, then freemium is a good option for your website. This type of website differs from the type described above simply because these types of services are common and already understood by potential users. Flickr.com is a good example of this type of website. Although you can view friend’s pictures on Flickr and become attracted to it’s ease of use as an end user, you won’t really know if it’s worth paying for extended use until you try uploading and organizing your photos for yourself. Since uploading and organizing is what Flickr does best, this must be experienced to make an impact on users. It will take a notable amount of time for a user to upload photos and start organizing them before they could give a good review of the website’s services. Once a user has used the website for a significant amount of time, a percentage of them can be convinced that additional features, like more data storage, are worth paying for. Flickr is not a new concept, but it does require extended time to analyze its usefulness. Products that users will use for a significant amount of time, such as web-based email, can also be great examples of the freemium model. If a user is going to switch from one service to another they would be thrilled to be able to give it a test drive before committing to the new service. Gmail.com, or any other up-and-coming web-based email system, who has to get Yahoo Mail and Hotmail users to jump ship, is an example of a potentially great freemium concept. If you’re going to expect your users to become intimate with (used daily/weekly for years) your product, a freemium model might be the right option.
Social Networking Websites
On some websites the main commodity is the people using the service or the content that those users create on the website. It can be very complicated to start a product like this. In order to attract users these services must be mostly free in most cases. Myspace.com, Facebook.com, Match.com, and even our own FidoFinder.com are examples of websites that only become useful once many others are also using the service. As more users sign up for the service, the service is worth more to its current users. These websites work best when they are of the freemium revenue model. On Fido Finder it’s important for us to have both users who register lost dogs and user who register found dogs. Lost dog finders post for free, as do lost dog owners, but lost dog owners are presented with optional upgrades to their account. It’s these users who pay for the usage that the other users get for free. Without the 100% free listings being taken advantage of, though, the group of users who would consider an upgrade simply wouldn’t exist. This is the same for dating, or other social, websites. If your website is going to need to develop a large network of users before it becomes valuable to the users, freemium is probably the best way to go.
I used NextWorth to sell my “old” iPhone (EPHT3GCK7PYK) before and got a good deal. I sold both a 3G and a 2G phone at the time. It’s a great service and easy to use. You simply enter the phone you want to sell, it’s condition, and they give you a quote. Once you accept the quote (and enter all your info) you have 21 days to send in your phone. You print the shipping labels right at home. It’s so easy. Within a week of receiving your phone they send you the money (I choose the PayPal option). With my iPhone 4 now ordered, I went ahead and set up for both my 3Gs and my wife’s 3G to be sold. It couldn’t be much easier, and the prices are fair. Sell your iPhone.
From time to time we send out promotional items for Fido Finder and order boxes from Uline. Uline is a great company with great products and customer support. What Uline doesn’t provide is screen printing on their boxes. I decided for the most recent batch of promotional mailings that I wanted to order boxes with the Fido Finder logo printed on them. When searching for a company to do this I ran into BoxGeek.com which will print your logo on the boxes you purchase. One of the other features that BoxGeek offers is custom box sizes which I also wanted to take advantage of.
So I ordered 120 12×9×5 boxes with the Fido Finder logo printed on 2 sides (standard option). The cost was $2.05 each. Similar-sized boxes from Uline would have been only ~$0.50. The price to me wasn’t an issue, as I saw it as only $2 per marketing kit, as opposed to 4-times the “normal” cost. The boxes I received are considerably lesser in quality than boxes that Uline sells. The (custom) cut lines on the BoxGeek boxes are less than perfect; with jagged edges and cardboard material hanging from some cuts (see image at bottom of post). The fold lines on the box flaps are not perfect. When you try to assemble the boxes they do not fold perfectly on the line where they should fold. Some times the box bows out or crumples along the line when you try to fold the flaps for the first time. On some of the boxes I got a z-shaped line where the flap folded instead of a clean, straight, crease. The glue used to put the boxes together is applied less carefully than with standard boxes. From the inside of the box you can often see glue spilling out from behind the box edges (see image at bottom of post). Most of the boxes I received were slightly glued shut/flat because of this glue being applied haphazardly and then the box closed flat for packing/shipping. This just meant I had to pop them open by sliding my hand inside each box. If I were assembling hundreds, or thousands, of boxes this would add noticeable time to assembling. The printing on the boxes is less than stellar. The location of the logo seems consistent but the printing quality varies from box to box. All of the boxes have some type of imperfection on the printed area. The ink is never applied 100% in any area, and many of the logos have a faded line or two vertically through the logo (see image at bottom of post). I’d say the print quality is 7 out of 10 at best. Overall the quality of the product would be 6.5 out of 10. I doubt these boxes could be used for more than their first shipping use. I’m scared to see what they look like after traveling across the country in a USPS truck.
For my need these boxes serve their purpose of getting a slightly more professional-looking box in the hands of potential customers/partners. For me, having the logo printed, in any quality, on the boxes out-weighs the lower quality boxes as I’m not shipping an actual product, just marketing materials (t-shirts, acrylic countertop display, and business cards). I’d use BoxGeek again, but I would find a better solution if I was mailing out actual products.
What is a Feedback Loop
Some ISP’s and email providers allow website owners to register into Email Feedback Loops. A feedback loop allows you to register to have emails that users mark as Spam forwarded to a specified email address. Each network requires different levels of information to register. I have registered with Yahoo’s Feedback Loop for all of my websites. I believe that Yahoo requires that you have DKIM set up to register (remember seeing it mentioned, already had it set up, didn’t affect me).
The Painful Truth
What I discovered through signing up for the feedback loop was bothersome. Be aware that you might become extremely frustrated if you sign up for a feedback loop and discover that your users are marking your opt-in emails as Spam. Imagine you run the largest Lost Dogs website in the world and users are marking “found dog added” customized alert notification emails as Spam instead of signing in and modifying their account after their lost dog is returned. Emails from a website that is trying to reunite lost pets, that people signed up for, is being marked as Spam by it’s own users, for no good reason. We’ve had deliverability issues from time to time with Yahoo, most of which have been resolved with the techniques in this blog post. But I would bet that these users recklessly marking emails as Spam contributes to our IP address being marked as a bulk mailer with Yahoo.
Making Lemonade
But you have to take something away from what you find is being marked as Spam. What I noticed was that most of the emails marked as Spam were for lost dog listings from 2008 or earlier. Currently we don’t ever expire alerts, people have to turn them off, but that’s going to change. We just can’t afford to have emails marked as Spam. Now, Yahoo tells you that having one email marked as Spam doesn’t affect you, but with a handful every other day I don’t see how Yahoo isn’t using this information against us. And I’m using this Yahoo feedback loop to extrapolate what is probably happening on other networks which might not be so forgiving.
Here is a list of some feedback loops that you might want to register for. At least register for one of the major ones and get an idea of what people are marking as Spam that you send out.
I have been running Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft ads for years to advertise my websites. I recently decided to try creating some ads on Facebook. The ads were a complete failure, and it seems like Facebook has missed a lot of potential with its ad network. I basically ran into the issue that they simply wouldn’t allow me to advertise any of my products, even though it appears is if they will.
What Facebook Ad Campaigns CAN Do
When you create a campaign in Facebook ads you type in keywords that you want to purchase ads for, similar to other advertising networks. The difference here is that you are constrained to Facebooks list of keywords. These keywords come from user profiles, only, from what I can tell. This can be awesome for some types of advertising. For example, my profile says I play poker, and I often see poker ads. Perfect. But that’s only one small part of potential advertising. First of all, my profile is very bare, but there is much more information posted on my wall that could contain potential advertising keywords.
What Facebook Ad Campaigns CAN’T Do
Nobody is a fan of lost pets, heart attacks, car wrecks, or arthritis. But companies sell products for all of these issues. With Facebook ads pulling keyword information from profiles you can only buy keywords for “positive” events and items. In the Facebook ad console you type keywords into a text box and Facebook pops up potential keywords for you to choose. Unlike Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, you can only purchase keywords that are in their system. This means although I can purchase the keyword “lost dogs” for Fido Finder, because there is a band called “The Lost Dogs” (can’t purchase the keyword “lost cats” a tall), I cannot target people posting that they actually lost a dog. In general, it appears that if people aren’t proud of the keywords you need to buy, you won’t have any success advertising on Facebook. I was completely unable to advertise Fido Finder and Tabby Tracker. Then, because of ridiculous, over-aggressive, “gambling” rules that we run into on every ad network, I cannot advertise League Ace or Hold’Em Hand History even though neither of them allows any kind of gambling.
The Volume/Traction Problem
Since I do run Tagomatic, a website for music, movies, books and website “reviews”, I did decide to run some “positive” ads on Facebook for people who are into “rock, rap, country, etc.” I also ran Naming Force ads for people who are “Starting a Business”. What I saw for these two campaigns was a quick run of a few thousand impressions in the first 2 days, that resulted in 4-5 clicks, and then no more impressions for the following weeks. No notice from Facebook about any issues. No information when I sign into the console. No suggestion on how to continue my campaigns. Nothing. Both campaigns just stopped getting impressions. Now, I’m smart enough to know that increasing my keyword bid would probably result in continued impressions. But IMO the system fails yet again in not allowing me to advertise my products for $0.20 a click, even if I get a low CTR, the way other ad networks would allow me to do. I don’t think the industry really knows what kind of ads people will click on Facebook, and the Facebook system doesn’t allow this information to develop. With me only getting a few thousand impressions I don’t even have the chance to tweak my ad text or campaign settings. How is anyone supposed to get off the ground with this system?
So for all 6 websites I currently have running I was not able to create a single successful campaign on Facebook for any of them. That’s just a FAIL.
Google AdWords is riddled with interface design faux pas. Below are two images representing one of them. Image 1 shows the page when the mouse is not over the “Enabled” label. Is there anything about “Enabled” that makes you think it might be an interface control? No. Then if you happen to mouse over it it suddenly becomes a custom interface control dropdown. What!? Why? Why would it not just always be a dropdown? AdWords is full of “hidden” controls like this that appear to just be text until you mouse over them. The usability suffers at their attempt to “keep the page clean”. This is what is known as a “false goal”.
Image 1:
Image 2:
I want to start chronicling interface design oversights, or mistakes, that I run into on websites. Hopefully creating these entries can help people to create websites and applications that are easier to use.
Mixing Positive and Negative
On the Petfinder.com’s search page you can select advanced options in the form of three checkboxes at the bottom of the search form. See Image 1 below. The first option is “Only (show) special needs pets”. The second option is “Only (show) declawed pets”. Both of these options are positive in the manner that they are worded. The terminology is positive, even though the option would technically exclude listings if checked. This is fine by itself. What’s not fine is the third option saying, “Exclude pets not recommended for children”. Suddenly we’re using negative terminology, “exclude”. Although all three options exclude listings, two of them say “Only (show)…” and one says “Exclude…”. Why wouldn’t this third option be “Only (show) pets recommended for children”? The inconsistent wording makes the interface confusing.
Image 1:
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Guaranteeing Email Delivery for Websites
0 Comments | Posted by Wes in Business, Development
One of the biggest problems I’ve run into as a commercial website owner is consistently delivering emails generated by my websites. The issues in doing this have been various and at each step of the way I’ve learn something that helps us to to deliver messages there on out. But each lesson comes from a shortcoming. Hopefully I can spell out some of the things I’ve learned that have helped to increase email deliverability for our websites.
The Number One Problem
The number one problem that affects email delivery is the server from which the emails originate. Or that server’s “reputation” at the time that you send your emails. If you run your website on a shared hosting environment, you will have problems getting emails delivered consistently to your users. When you have no control over what emails are coming from your email server’s IP address you put your own deliverability results in jeopardy. One of the misunderstandings we had along the way was that having a dedicated web server meant that we had a dedicated email server. Like many programmers we simply used PHP’s mail feature and never really knew where the emails went from there. Although our website was delivered from a dedicated server, all outgoing emails were routed through a small collection of email servers. It’s not a problem that your email server has a different IP address than your website, it’s just an issue that you can’t keep Joe Schmoe from sending spam, or just sending too much email – which looks like spam, through “your” (shared) email server. The webhost in question did not allow us to run our own email service on our web server, so we had problems using their email server until we later moved to Rackspace. I’m a programming, and not a network admin guy, so I don’t know even know how to set up a Linux/Unix web server to send mail, I was just told it was not allowed with our webhost, even though we had a dedicated server. With this host it was much more of a managed server, and we could do a lot less than we can do now at Rackspace. Not that this type of hosting bad, it’s just not ideal for what we needed. So during the time that we had a dedicated web server but not email server we ended up using a 3rd party email service provider (ESP) to help get emails delivered more consistently. This definitely helped, complaints were down, but it wasn’t the ideal solution, and costs more than sending emails strictly through your own server. The very best scenario is to either have your own separate email server (overkill) or have your web server box configured to be your own email server. This way you have control over your server’s reputation with the ISP’s and email providers of the world.
Reply To?
This tip is one that seems a little ridiculous, but I tested it and it’s completely true. When generating emails programmatically I never thought to populate the “ReplyTo” field. I just thought that email clients reply to the From address unless the ReplyTo happens to be filled out. So why would I ever put something in the ReplyTo property? It turned out that with one major email service provider if I sent an email without the ReplyTo specifically set to the same address as the From field, it would send the email to the spam folder. Weirdest thing to me, but when I discovered this I just changed all of my code to add the From address as the ReplyTo address. This kept emails from going to the spam folder for this one major email provider.
DNS Entries
A few things at the DNS level can be done to help ensure email delivery. I don’t know these settings, or entries, well enough to deeply discuss setting them up, since I set them up once with Rackspace based on articles I read, and haven’t touched them since, so I’m just going to touch on the concepts to guide you in the right direction.
- One of those settings is reverse DNS lookup entry. It’s one thing for Example.com to resolve to 98.129.58.195 when you attempt to visit the website, but if an email server gets emails from 98.129.58.195 that claim they are from example@example.com, how can it test to see if the sending server really hosts Example.com? Reverse DNS lookup. I won’t attempt to discuss the technical details, because I don’t know them, but be sure that your DNS records have reverse DNS set up so that email servers can verify that your emails are coming from the correct server.
- Another DNS record that can help email delivery is an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record. The idea behind an SPF record is for your domain server to be able to be queried and asked for a list of email servers that are allowed to send email for your domain. Even if you’re sending emails from the same server IP address, it helps to project to the email servers out there that your emails are allowed to be created from this IP address for your domain name.
- The third DNS record that can help with delivery is DomainKeys. This was a little more complicated to set up, but luckily Plesk took care of all the hard work. DomainKeys is a more sophisticated way of identifying that a specific message was sent from a specific server. DomainKeys works in a public-key scenario, so a key is sent in the email that can be verified by querying the DNS server. Google it, or contact your webhost to find out how to set this up. It will be a combination of server settings and DNS entries.
Abuse@ and Postmaster@
Another thing that email servers can detect is the existence of certain email addresses. It’s a common tip that having a valid abuse@example.com and postmaster@example.com helps to deliver emails. This one I can’t vouch for, but I do have them set up because I’ve read it multiple times.
Handle Bounced Emails
One thing that can make you look like a spammer is sending emails to bad email addresses. Whether they never existed or are expired, it just looks bad. You can minimize this by handling bounced emails correctly to keep for resending emails to bad addresses. The way we do this is to:
- Set the Return-Path value in your email headers that contains the email address being sent to for each email. In doing this your giving yourself a way to know where an email was sent when it bounces back to your saver. An example of what you can put in the Return-Path header field is user=yahoo.com@example.com. It’s the user’s email address in front of the @example.com with the “to” address’s @ sign replaced by “=” to keep it valid. So an email to user@yahoo.com has a return path of user=yahoo.com@example.com.
- Have a default email address handle all mail to invalid email addresses for your domain (user=yahoo.com@fidofinder does not exist). So we have all emails sent to an invalid address funnel to bounce@example.com.
- Pipe the Return-Path “address” to a script that can process them, most likely adding them to a database table of emails to not send to. I have a PHP script that can do this for qmail. Contact me if you need it. It just reads the email left of the “@” and replaces the “=” and puts it in a table. The code is a little weird as it has to read the stream of data being piped to it. It took me a while to find the correct code to do this.
- Obviously, you now consult the database table when sending emails to stop sending emails to addresses that have bounced in the past. This again just prevents you from looking like a spammer.
Timing and Volume
Two things that affect if your valid email looks like spam is the timing of the email and the volume. Large email providers know if you are sending the same email to thousands of addresses. And even if this is to registered users of your website, it can look spammy. Avoid this by sending emails in spurts. If you need to email 100K users write a script to do this a little at a time throughout a day. And avoid sending emails between midnight and 5 AM, even though it’s the choice of most programmers to do maintenance tasks at low-volume times. Spam too is mostly sent during these hours. Another tip is that if you want your emails to not appear to be spammy, send more emails on a regular basis. I’ve always felt that sending fewer emails would be better, but I’ve seen suggestions of the opposite.
Unsubscribe and Postal Address
They say that the major email providers can tell if you included an unsubscribe link at the bottom of your email or not. Whether they actually do this I do not know, but since I’ve read that they do, I include it. Don’t assume that the URL has to go to a fancy automatic unsubscribe system. It’s fine if it goes to a page where a user can sign in to change their settings or delete their account. And since in some states it’s required to have a postal address included in email marketing, throw your postal address at the bottom as well. I’ve read that this too is detected by the major providers.
That’s It!
Well there you have it. There are probably other tips, but those are the ones I’ve learned over the past 6 years. It’s been a huge learning process, and a thorn in my side at times, but currently emails are delivered at a fairly good rate which I can only measure by a low volume of user complaints.
